Hello and thanks for letting me join.

[Des Taff Jenkins]

Hi Gareth.
Is there any chance that the Dingo is a descendant or some off shoot of the Thylacine, very similar in appearance except for the coulor?
Cheers Des

[happy daze john in oz]

Des from what I know of it the Tasmanian Tiger was unique to Tassie, the last one dying in captifity in the 30's.

There have been claims of sightings on numerous occasions in Tassie.

With much of the bush there being very harsh and hard to penetrate it is conceivable that maybe there are some who choose to hide from man.
It is very sad when any species becomes extinct though many such as the Dinosoar did leave some behind. The Aligator is claimed to be such a creature.

[Gareth Linnard]

Hi Gareth.
Is there any chance that the Dingo is a descendant or some off shoot of the Thylacine, very similar in appearance except for the coulor?
Cheers Des

No Des, the dingo is a placental mammal, the thylacine was a marsupial, they last shared a common ancestor 120,000,000 years ago, this is well before any modern groups appeared. The reason they look similar is because they both independantly evolved to do similar things. Thylacine skulls and canid skulks are almost indistinguishable but the teeth tell a slightly different story, dogs have grinding as well as slicing molars, because as generalists they can eat a variety of things, thykacines though only had meat shearing molars, as they were dedicated fulltime carnivores. They couldn't snarl like dogs, if a thylacine wanted to warn you off it'd open its mouth to 80 degrees and hiss at you (you can see this on film 5 at the link on the previous page, the photographer was bitten during the course of filming). Their bite too was different, instead if the tearing, pulling, slashing sort of dog bite, thylacines snapped out single high powered bites. There's anecdotes about them biting through the skulls of dogs with a single snap, and of them stealing frying pans at night from camps and crushing them with their jaws, but I'm not very convinced.

Despite a very powerful bite, and a skull evolved to deliver it, they had a weakness, the base of the skull was probably unable to cope with lateral force, meaning that if it had tried to restrain a large struggling animal in its jaws, its skull would have catostrophically failed. This and tooth wear patterns suggest that despite its impressive size, huge gape, and bite power, the thylacine probably hunted small prey. Another difference between the thylacine and wild dogs is the agression level, thylacines appear to have been very laid back animals, apart from the nip to the photographer mentioned above, there are no convincing reports of an injury to a human by a thylacine.

Most illustrative difference between dogs and thylacines though is reproduction. A new born tiger would have been anything between the size of a grain of rice, and and a broad bean. After birth, at which point it'd be little more than a tiny pink worm with front legs, it'd follow a saliva trail from the mother's dorsal vent (into which its two vaginas would have opened), into its rearward facing pouch where it would have pushed its little mouth over a nipple, which in turn would swell up inside the baby's mouth forming a ball and socket joint. It would stay there fixed to the nipple and go through most of its development outside the mother's body. Male plumbing was equally weird, it had a prehensile double headed penis, which was strictly for reproduction. Urination took place through thhe dorsal vent, into which the anus and urethra opened. The testicles are above not below the penis, and this gives the male thylacine a distinctive shape to its back end. With the exception of a pouch which is absent in some species, these features are shared by all marsupials.

But you hit the nail on the head with the colour Des, though they're usually portrayed as being the same colour as a dingo, and many of the skins have faded to thus colour, thylacines were actually predominantly olive grey.

[Gareth Linnard]

Des from what I know of it the Tasmanian Tiger was unique to Tassie, the last one dying in captifity in the 30's.

There have been claims of sightings on numerous occasions in Tassie.

With much of the bush there being very harsh and hard to penetrate it is conceivable that maybe there are some who choose to hide from man.
It is very sad when any species becomes extinct though many such as the Dinosoar did leave some behind. The Aligator is claimed to be such a creature.

Yes, the night of September the 7th 1936, saw the death of the last known tiger. On the mainland, the most recent date is about 2.5kya, up in PNG the date is 5kya, but I'm not sure how reliable that last one is.

There are people who believe it still might exist out there. Some of whom are crazy, but others including a friend of mine are very sharp, but I don't personally, I'm convinced it's extinct. But it's fair to say that the idea is not settled even among some of the leading experts in animal's biology.

There was a piece of evidence that'd been doing the rounds out of the public eye for the last 20 years, but about a month ago someone exposed itas a hoax, lot of red faces in the tiger worldat the moment.

As for them being in the bush now, it's not really possible. Someone did the numbers the other day of how many you'd need to maintain a viable population, and it's a huge number far more than could stay hidden. Plus, they'd never try, they'd just carry on with their normal lives without ever knowing they'd been persecuted or hunted, or even undersranding the concept of needing to stay hidden.

There's remote bush in Tasmania today, but back in the early part of the last century the fur trappers were right through the place. The number of animals, possums, wallabies etc, killed is staggering, really, I had to read them over and over before I could believe them. Nothing could have got through that undetected.

About the dinosaurs; as Archosaurs, alligators and crocs are indeed related to dinosaurs but not very closely. There are though about 10,000 species of therapod dinosaur alive today, the birds. Birds are 100% dinosaur, no feature exists in birds that isn't found in non bird dinosaurs. You do hear people say that birds are descended from dinosaurs, but this is wrong, by no definition can it be said that they're outside the group. They're not derived from it, they're part of it. Your robin is as much a dinosaur as a triceratops.

This is supposed to be the age of the mammals, yet there are twice as many dinosaur species alive today than there are mammal, and by species about 50% of mammals are vulnerable to predation by dinosaurs, but by indaviduals it's in the high nineties.

[Keith at Tregenna]

Meant to add this earlier, not long in busy day. I would imagine nothing new for Gareth but,
I found it of interest and others may also.

The Quest For The Thylacine

https://www.thedodo.com/the-quest-fo...404019258.html

K.

[Des Taff Jenkins]

Hi Gareth.
Thanks for the tutorial, this is an amazing country, and there is so much even after over forty years living here I know so little about.
You have brought me may I say up to date on one small aspect.
Cheers Des

[Colin Wood]

Don't know about being confined to Tassie, cave drawings in Kakadu are almost the same as the Tassie Tigers.

[Gareth Linnard]

Hi Gareth.
Thanks for the tutorial, this is an amazing country, and there is so much even after over forty years living here I know so little about.
You have brought me may I say up to date on one small aspect.
Cheers Des

I hadn't realised you were over there. I saw the flag and assumed you lived here. Where in Wales are you from originally Des?

[Gareth Linnard]

Don't know about being confined to Tassie, cave drawings in Kakadu are almost the same as the Tassie Tigers.

That's right. They seem to have disappeared from the mainland around 2.5kya. But as you say there's rock art which depict them, and most spectacularly there are some mummified remains. One from a cave on the Nullarbor Plain is a complete animal. Safe link to a picture.

The Thylacine Museum - Palaeontology: Prehistoric Range of the Thylacine (page 4)

[Robert Byron]

A good bit of research would be going back a couple of centuries before the 20s Gareth, of livestock transported by ship to the new world , a horror story of how the horse latitudes got their name. and Des Taff is so right about the present trade , a further disgrace was the RSPCA being an investor in this nasty trade from WA,
good luck with your research
bob byron